Companies are always looking for cutting-edge technologies that can revolutionize the ways of doing business. Customer service continues to remain an important element for businesses of all sizes. The latest technology that promises to improve customer service levels by leaps and bounds is automated bots in messaging apps like Facebook Messenger.
Humans have always loved the idea of robots having feelings. Hollywood has cashed in on this affinity in multiple films, from making robots fall in love with each other, to an alternative dystopian future where robots are taught to feel, leading them to overpower humans. But even with such narratives, humans like it better when chatbots are taught more about feelings and made to assist them with empathy1.
The digitally conscious customer of today needs immediate responses. A key factor in staying ahead of the competition is the ability to provide proactive customer support to your customers. Live chat support came to the rescue and enabled agents to respond to customers as swiftly as they could. But this was not good enough. It is almost impossible for live agents to be available all the time for the omnipresent customer.
It is difficult to overstate the importance and impact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had on the employee experience. This is crystal clear when you see how employees are interacting with their IT departments. Employees expect technology to just work. When there are technical problems the expectation is that fixing the issue will be fast and seamless. An increasingly important part of meeting this employee demand is the virtual agent, or chatbot.
After switching to a different email address, I recently logged in to my client account to change the contact information my mobile company had. On seeing the email field greyed out and uneditable, I visited their Help and Support page for assistance. Live chat support was available. It was 9:31 in the morning. Someone was already waiting for me—Gie. This Facebook Messenger-based bot initiated the conversation with one of the more tedious stages of getting support: account verification.
